They arrived separately, bought from different booksellers, and they all look alike. Brown cloth, smooth spine, modest format, the sort of publisher’s binding they turned out by the thousand in the twenties, and that has held for ninety years without complaint. The paper has yellowed at the edges, it stays white in the middle, and it crackles a little when you open it wide. In the top left corner of the first volume’s flyleaf, a signature in ink, that of a previous owner, written in a steady hand. I do not know who it was. All I know is that he bought this book before me, and that the book outlived his library.
On the four covers, the same name, in a transcription no longer used: Jagadis Chunder Bose. And beneath the name, the same publisher’s address, repeated from one volume to the next like the address of a friend. Gauthier-Villars, 55 quai des Grands-Augustins, Paris 6e.
I read them one after another, in the autumn of 2016, in the order they came to hand rather than in order of date. What I was looking for in them was method. What I found on top of that, without looking for it, was a French story.
What is in the pile
Response in the Living and Non-Living, in the French translation by Édouard Monod-Herzen (Réactions de la matière vivante et non vivante), 1926.
Comparative Electro-Physiology, in the French translation by Dr Pierre Lehmann (Électrophysiologie comparée), 1927.
The Nervous Mechanism of Plants, in the French translation by Édouard Monod-Herzen (Le Mécanisme nerveux des plantes), 1931.
Plant Autographs and Their Revelations, in the French translation by Édouard and Gabriel Monod-Herzen (Les Autographes des plantes et leurs révélations), 1934.
Eight years of work, then, and a publishing house that does not let go. Two are missing from my shelves, both listed by the BnF with the same publisher, and I have not found them yet: The Physiology of the Ascent of Sap, translated into French by Nicolas Deniker in 1927, and The Physiology of Photosynthesis, translated the same year by J. and M.-L. Dufrenoy, with a preface by Louis Mangin.
Six volumes in French, between 1926 and 1934. This is not a publishing curiosity, it is an undertaking.
The publisher, and what that means
Gauthier-Villars was not an esoteric outfit. It was the French scientific house par excellence, the house of Poincaré, the house of the great treatises on mathematics and physics, the reference you cite without needing to introduce it. To publish six volumes of Bose on that list was to shelve him with the hard sciences, not with the oddities.
The man who prefaced the photosynthesis volume says the same thing in another way. Louis Mangin directed the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle from 1919 to 1931. He was a member of the Académie des sciences, and he was its president in 1929. When a man in that position agrees to sign the opening pages of a book, he is not making a private gesture, he is committing an institution.
None of this comes out of nowhere. Bose had given a paper to the Société française de physique on 5 April 1902, published the same year in the Journal de Physique, volume 1, pages 481 to 491. He sat on the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations from 1924 to 1931, and the institute of that committee was in Paris. He gave a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1926, of which a press photograph by the Agence Meurisse survives, held at the BnF. A man standing, a hall, a day in 1926.
Who translates, and that is where it gets interesting
We rarely look at the translators. Here, they tell almost the whole story.
Édouard Monod-Herzen signs two and a half volumes of the series. He is not a physiologist. He is a decorative artist, a specialist in metal engraving, librarian of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. He published Science et esthétique in 1925, then Principes de morphologie générale with Gauthier-Villars in 1927, the same house, the same year as two of the Bose volumes. He corresponded with the mathematician Vito Volterra, and with Freud.
Take the measure of what that adds up to. A man who thinks about form, who works metal, who shelves art books, and who spends years bringing the electrical physiology of plants into French. The bridge between aesthetics and measurement, he did not theorise it from a distance, he crossed it on foot, page after page.
Gabriel Monod-Herzen is his son, and he co-signs the last volume, the one from 1934. At that point he is thirty-five and he is working on neutrons. His thesis, “Recherches sur les neutrons”, comes out the following year in the Annales de Physique. He is also a member of the Theosophical Society. Thirteen years later, he co-signs with Pavitra the Message of Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, published in Pondicherry in 1947.
In other words, he translates Bose exactly at the hinge between his two lives. Behind him nuclear physics, ahead of him spiritual India, and in between, on his desk, a Bengali scientist who plugs electrodes into plants and records their responses. You could not wish for anyone better placed.
Nicolas Deniker, who translates the ascent of sap, comes from a wholly different quarter. He was a poet from Apollinaire’s inner circle, a co-founder of Le Festin d’Ésope, and the son of the head librarian of the Muséum. A poet from Apollinaire’s crowd translating a treatise on the rise of water in stems, that is a shortcut I would not have dared invent.
That leaves Pierre Lehmann, of the 1927 volume. He is probably the electrophysiologist and doctor of medicine (1886-1960) listed in the BnF records, but I have nothing solid enough to say so. I leave the question open rather than settle it.
What remains of it
Add it all up. Poincaré’s publisher. A preface by the president of the Académie des sciences. The Sorbonne. The League of Nations. A son of the Muséum’s librarian, a poet of Apollinaire’s, a decorative artist who corresponded with Freud, a neutron physicist. Eight years of sustained translation. France did not receive Bose on the curiosities shelf, it received him through the front door, and more than once.
And yet. Look for his name today in an ordinary conversation about plants, you will not find it. His six French volumes sleep in second-hand bookshops at a few euros apiece. The questions he was asking, about the continuity of responses between the living and the non-living, about the fatigue of a tissue you stimulate too much, about what a trace records exactly, have been coming back for the past ten years in journals and at conferences, presented as new. They are a century old. There are good reasons to ask them again, there is no reason at all to pretend they were never asked.
That is also why these four volumes never leave my desk. When I am working out how to plug in a plant without exhausting it, I reread Bose before I reread anyone else.
Read in the autumn of 2016. Post written in 2026.
